The contemporary Metropolis. Mass. Machine – a hundred years on and viewed from the perspective of humanity on the brink of annihilation. The city, indeed, has changed everything.

This exhibition juxtaposes two expansive, post-industrial and post-punk total projects: Planet City by Liam Young and Dragon’s Teeth by Mariusz Waras. Both artists employ the city as metaphor and medium of their work, yet with very different starting points and ends. Both share a deep commitment to the practice of world-building – the creation of internally coherent, fictional realities. For Young, this grew out of architecture and film; for Waras, from computer games, street art, and the demoscene. Finally, both engage in complex media hybridity: Planet City unfolds across film, objects, publication, and virtual reality; Dragon’s Teeth is as an immersive audiovisual installation accompanied by paintings.

Planet City is a speculative, critical narrative envisioning a hyper-dense metropolis in which all of humanity is relocated, freeing the remainder of the Earth to regenerate. This radical solution echoes Edward O. Wilson’s earlier proposal of leaving 50% of the Earth’s land mass to nature, expressed in his Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. In Young’s vision, however, 10 billion people inhabit a single urban organism occupying merely 0.02% of the planet’s surface. He counts on the Earth’s self-healing capacities, as described by Alan Weisman in The World Without Us: “On the day after humans disappear, nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning house – our houses, that is. Cleans the right off the face of the earth. They all go”**. Many structures would not survive more than 10–15 years; entire cities, not even a century. Against this backdrop, Planet City is presented as a metropolis that rescues everything – a place where everybody lives, where everything has been built anew, pulsating in perpetual celebration: 365 days a year of parades, festivals, cultural polyphony.

Waras’ urban imago mundi, by contrast, is devoid of human presence. Instead, there is mechanistic urban sprawl – a dynamic and overproductive city-machine where architecture replicates itself in relentless configurations. Here, space is marked by violence, surveillance, and control. Waras’ architecture is monument to conflict, bearing the scars of past wars, grappling with present ones, and fortifying itself against future crises. The title Dragon’s Teeth invokes the founding myth of Cadmus, who sows the monster’s teeth and reaps warriors. Only five, survivors of fratricide, go on to found Thebes. Waras’s looped installation mirrors this cyclical repletion of myth and history. 

Everything_City presents a vision that is at once utopian and dystopian, addressing the scale of destruction, the climate crisis, ethical collapse, the stagnation of the Anthropocene, our collective helplessness in the face of planetary challenges, and the limits of both moderation and excess. It explores the city as both an instrument of domination and a potential agent of transformation, considered through the lens of distributed responsibility and agency among humans, technology, and the natural world.

Liam Young contends that in this “moment without a future” – or “threshold of no return” – we must allow ourselves to imagine and articulate aspirational narratives. Within the Polish discourse on the twilight of the human epoch, a comparable appeal arises in the works of Ewa Bińczyk and Ewa Domańska. Bińczyk closes her Epoka człowieka. Retoryka i marazm antropocenu (The Age of Man: Rhetoric and Stagnation of the Anthropocene)*** with a meditation on the necessity of envisioning futures “against the times,” learning to engage with the unimaginable, and creating utopias as strategies of protection and resistance.

* Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, New York, 2017, p. 234.
** Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, New York, 2007, p. 25.
***  Cf. Ewa Bińczyk, Epoka człowieka. Retoryka i marazm antropocenu, Warsaw, 2018, p. 280.